138 THE HOUSE AND ITS EQUIPMENT. 



and garden. The garden was equally the work of the architect ; indeed, in many, if not most, 

 cases the garden was more lavishly treated with architectural enrichment than the house itself. Many 

 of these gardens have perished, some, indeed, quite recently, but enough remain to impress us with a just 

 idea of the sense of dignity and harmony with which the minds of their designers were saturated. No 

 doubt they had the advantage of a simplicity of apprehension and aim which to modern designers is a 

 thing of the past. For they had the ancient classical models and tradition alone, while we of modern 

 days have our minds encumbered and distracted, and our sense of fitness perplexed, by a vast number 

 of influences bearing upon questions of ornament. For to us the word ornament means decoration, not 

 of one, but of many styles ; not classical only, but of Gothic, Egyptian, Assyrian, Indian, Arab and 

 Moorish, and numberless base hybrids of these well-defined styles. We have to allow that the marvellous 

 discoveries and inventions of the nineteenth century and the diffusion of education have had some evil 

 effects among their many good ones. Easy production by casting and stamping of metal by machinery, 

 facility of communication combined with superficial smatterings of many branches of knowledge, trade 

 competition (that greatest of all enemies to artistic production), that during the last century have flooded 

 the world with masses of cheap rubbish, falsely called ornamental because covered with some kind of 



155. A COPY OF THE WARWICK VASE. 



pattern all these influences tend to debase and confuse public taste. The honest student of pure decoration, 

 faced at every step with some one or other ignoble, if not actually vile, design in building, in furniture, 

 in every kind of public erection and domestic appointment, has, with infinite labour and difficulty, to free 

 his mind from all this mass of clogging impediment and to begin quite afresh ; moreover, he must acquire 

 a considerable measure of critical discernment before he can find his way through the maze of so-called 

 ornament, false, intrusive and meretricious, that surrounds him on every side. It is sad to think of this 

 and to know that it is an apparently unavoidable side-issue of our progress all this ill-directed effort, 

 all this toilsome production of bad and debasing inutility. 



The artists of the Renaissance had no such stumbling-blocks. They had, it is true, some knowledge 

 of Gothic architecture ; but it was never rooted in Italy as was the Classical ; and when the great upheaval 

 came, when the men of wealth and influence searched for and endowed and upheld those who were already 

 possessed of learning, industry and genius, it was to the classical literature of Greece and Rome, to their 

 architecture, sculpture and decoration, that the energy of these giants of the Middle Ages was directed. 

 Then were created those wonderful gardens whose general designs have remained to us as superb models, 

 the precious quality of whose decorative detail as garden ornament has never been surpassed or even 

 approached. Their influence was to reach our English gardens in late Tudor days, though in the earlier 



